ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: In Paris

Sunday, November 29, 2015

In Paris

So I'm sitting in my hotel at FIAC, what an amazing hotel, honestly. Right behind Les Invalides, wow. Anyway--iTunes tells me that I need to listen to this. So I do.

One of the things that the ecological emergency (here comes COP21) and incidents like the shootings in Paris do is crush our ability to fantasize. Anything, anything to restart that. I think that's what Interstellar is mostly about. The first half of this tune works pretty good as a restart mechanism, no?

I'm a sucker for pararhyme, which is where the consonants stay the same-ish and the vowels change. It's such a subtle, and in this case quite sexy, effect. Wilfrid Owen uses it to send chills down your spine but these guys are using it to make you feel nice.

Paris / promise / on it

Nice...

I love how this tune begins. I love the horsey-trotty beats and the nice tonic triad inversion of that jaunty little keyboard line, tracking the bass. Very tasty. Later, it sort of deteriorates into something like a Fischerspooner-like dirge, which is a shame. If it was me I would've broken out the 303 : )

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Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Sunday, November 29, 2015

In Paris

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